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Comment by mgirdley | Hacker News Reader

The fatal flaw in all of these startups was they just aggregated content. None of them solved the real problem of distilling the overwhelming amount of content online into the few thing(s) I should read.

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That's probably fair. The quest for personalized news predates most people being on the Internet [1] and I think it's fair to say that no one has really come up with top-notch, personalized curation that blows people away. In practice, it's easier to let social media, RSS readers, and sites like this one provide you with a river of potentially interesting content that you skim and dive into as appropriate.

I'm also not sure how much people would be willing to pay even for really good content curation even if such a thing exited. And the reality is that curation is hard because my interests on a given day depend on so many factors from how busy I am to my mood to some event that piqued my interest.

[1] http://news.mit.edu/1994/newspaper-0309

I pay for curation -- it's my subscriptions to the economist and the nytimes (for which I only read the front page).

I found that Zite did an incredible job of presenting high-signal content for me. I became so reliant on it that I would have paid a significant amount to subscribe, probably on the order of a spotify subscription. But that was after years of use and training; I can't imagine anybody selling me on a curation service at any price without that experience.

This right here is the reason. It's fulfilling to get to the end of an RSS feed, but currently all solutions are just lists of articles. None of the technologies really do any significant filtering for you with the exception of possibly Facebook. And even then, it seems like the Newfeed degenerates into awful click bait.

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